What Makes a Good Autobiography (Part 2 of The Recordalife Guide to Creating Your Memoirs)

This is the second part of our serialisation of our upcoming book The Recordalife Guide to Creating Your Memoirs. Every post will be a chapter from this book, which we will make available at the end of the serialisation.

One of the most difficult things that you can face is the reality of exactly who you are, what you have done in your life, and how this should matter to other people. Quite simply, most people find it difficult to write their memoirs or autobiography because it is a form of self-reflection that intimidates many people, at least on a subconscious level. This is the main reason that many people love the idea of writing their memoirs but put it off, and put it off, and put it off, usually never to actually do it. It’s why we started Recordalife in the first place, and why we offer life story services so that you don’t have to do the hard work yourself but rather we interview you and write it all for you, similar to a ghostwriter of your autobiography.

Facing yourself can be the most difficult thing you ever do in your life. If you missed it, read that sentence again and let it sink in for a minute. A big part of any autobiography is the reflecting that the author does when putting the content together. You will not be able to write an autobiography unless it has this level of introspection and reflection. This is because people do not just want to hear about events in your life, but how they shaped and moulded you into the person that you are today, from when you were born to the grown, mature adult you have become.

5 Features That Make a Good Autobiography

So what makes a good autobiography? Several things come together and we’d like to list them here and now:

A good autobiography takes the time to reflect upon the events that have taken place in your life so that a final picture of your achievements and character can be communicated.

A good autobiography provides many nuggets of wisdom to guide people who want to live a similar life to your own, or who are family members and want to know how you, and they, got there.

A good autobiography has many examples of overcoming events and difficulties in life that could have caused other people to quit.

A good autobiography takes life’s lessons and learns from these lessons to make a better person.

A good autobiography takes into consideration unhappy or bad events and uses them to gain wisdom to prevent that from happening again.

In fact, you can’t have a decent autobiography if it doesn’t go through all of these events to characterise you as a true survivor and someone that has learned viable life lessons and now wants to pass them on to others.

This should be the driving force behind any autobiography, and when you are ready to crack open creating your memoirs you now have a focus of how this information should be put together.

Remember that your memoirs are simply a reflection of the information that you’ve accrued, much the way someone who would keep a diary would do. The difference is that memoirs are written because you know in time they will be turned into an autobiography, into book form with long life, perhaps to be read by many future generations.

Amazing programme on dealing with the loss of a parent to cancer as a child (which also inspired our founder Mike, a @SpursOfficial fan) on @talkSPORTLive @talksport now. Respect to @Mrjamieohara1 for such dignity and strength, & the excellent @Bloomers57 #lifestories @samaritans

Leading genealogist Lisa Lisson from @Areyoumycousin will be interviewing our founder Mike on Facebook Live about capturing contemporary oral history of loved ones such as grandparents. Tune in this Thursday 1pm EST (6pm GMT). https://t.co/0zD6m1PhAN
https://t.co/YqrG4svoA5

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